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It's easy to speculate about this stuff if you've never actually worked on it to make it better.

Or maybe Shlomi lives on a trust fund, and doesn't need an income. Personally I know that it's really really hard work to make good documentation, and really really hard work to write a book. And neither of those things would I do for free any more, unless I had a really good reason for it.

But now I'm old, and cantankerous. It was different when I was younger.

For the record, I actually contributed a lot to online documentation. See for example my online lectures [shlomifish.org], the documentation of my CPAN modules [cpan.org], the patches I sent to perl*.pod, my essays, articles and blog posts, etc. Also see
my Freecell Solver library [berlios.de] which is extensively documented and all of its documentation is under the public domain.

Personally I know that it's really really hard work to make good documentation, and really really hard work to write a book. And neither of those things would I do f

I see nothing "idealistic" about saying people should give things away for free. It is, to me, "idealistic" to say that it is purely their own business whether to do so or not, and that whether that decision is good or bad can only be properly judged by themselves.

I agree with you that people should not be forced to give their property (much less their real-estate) for free. But copyrights and the so-called "intellectual property", while having implicit and explicit ownership, is not property.

George Bernard Shaw said it better than I:

If I have an apple and you have an apple, and we exchange apples, then we both would still have one apple.

But we if we both have one idea, and we exhange ideas, then we'll now have two ideas.

I agree with you that people should not be forced to give their property (much less their real-estate) for free. But copyrights and the so-called "intellectual property", while having implicit and explicit ownership, is not property.

So you are saying they SHOULD be forced to give their "intellectual property" for free.

George Bernard Shaw said it better than I

No, he said nothing in regards to this topic, not in the quote you provided, anyway. All he said there was that you still have your idea if you give it to someone else. That in no way implies anything about whether you should be forced to do it.

Copyrights evolved at the time...

I am in no need of a history lesson.

What I was trying to say in my essay... is that making books available online (willingly) is good for both sides.

I do not care about that, and was not responding to that.

What I said in a previous essay is that the Law must not restrict (and cannot effectively restrict) non-commercial redistribution of content that was made public and available. (I.e: something that's not personal, private, secret, etc.)

Right. You want the government to force me to give things away for free.

While it is true that this is the reason it is granted, I am not so sure that creators wouldn't create without it. History does not provide too many examples of this. The Internet -- where copyright infractions are the rule, rather than the exception -- sees a ton of creativity.

Yes, technically the government isn't forcing you to not give anything away, hence the "so to speak." But you have to admit, it made a nicer parallelism that way. I'm just saying, eliminating pieces or all of current copyright is not the government forcing you to give things away, it's merely the government ceasing to grant an artificial monopoly on an infinite resource.

I'm not saying such a monopoly is a bad thing, I'm just saying that's what it is. After all, if it's there, we *can* choose to not exercise it. (It does need reasonable limits, so stuff doesn't end up locked up forever, and so that people who want to *base* their creativity on others' aren't handcuffed.)

But if it's not there, in order to attempt to create a non-governmental artificial monopoly we end up with insanity like DRM. (Like, for instance, my mother's embroidery machine, currently a $4k doorstop because WinXP handles parallel ports differently than Win95 did and so the dongle is no longer recognized. No, I'm not bitter.)

Yes, technically the government isn't forcing you to not give anything away, hence the "so to speak."

I do not understand. To me, if it is not technically doing it, it is not doing it. I don't get how the "so to speak" changes anything.

But you have to admit, it made a nicer parallelism that way.

Not for me. I don't get it at all.

I'm just saying, eliminating pieces or all of current copyright is not the government forcing you to give things away, it's merely the government ceasing to grant an artificial monopoly on an infinite resource.

I disagree. I think what I said is perfectly accurate. But we appear to disagree on whether such things can be owned. And again, just because it wasn't recognized as owned before, doesn't mean I can't recognize it as such.